Burundi's war is tough test for S.Africa mediator
By William Maclean
BUJUMBURA, July 15 (Reuters) - The omens could hardly be worse for a fresh bid this week to revive Burundi's ailing peace process: a grim toll of dead, wounded and displaced in hillside suburbs turned into shell-pocked battlefields by civil war.
Some of the heaviest fighting of Burundi's ethnic conflict brought new terror to the capital Bujumbura over the past eight days, erasing hopes that the country's 6.5 million people might soon be firmly on the road to peace after a decade of bloodshed.
South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma flies in on Wednesday to try to end the new violence only 2-1/2 months after he and Nelson Mandela attended a landmark political transition that saw a Tutsi amicably hand the presidency to a Hutu.
Zuma has a huge task in restoring peace hopes after a fusillade of mortar bombs and attacks on the city by Hutu rebels triggered heavy fighting with the Tutsi-dominated army in which more than 200 people were killed.
"Zuma will have a difficult task," said Eugene Nindorera, a former human rights minister. "But if no one tries to do anything, the process could start going backwards."
"The fighting has dealt the peace process a near fatal blow," said South African analyst Jan van Eck.
More than 300,000 Burundians, mostly civilians, have been killed since 1993 in a war that at times has aggravated hatreds across the Great Lakes region, fanning the flames of Rwanda's genocide and stirring conflict in neighbouring Congo.
HUTU PRESIDENT
Under a planned three-year transition to democracy President Domitien Ndayizeye on April 30 became Burundi's first Hutu president for seven years and called on the rebels to disarm.
But fighting has continued between the army and the main rebel groups, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD) and the smaller Forces for National Liberation (FNL), fighting to end the minority Tutsis' dominance of the government and army.
It was the extremist FNL that began pummelling parts of Bujumbura with mortar bombs on July 7 in its fiercest attack on the lakeside capital for months.
The FDD, which unlike the FNL agreed a widely ignored ceasefire with the government in December, played no apparent part in the attacks, but analysts say they suspect some of its fighters may have taken part in the FNL assault.
Analysts say the fighting is undermining efforts by Ndayizeye, now on a tour of Europe, to obtain more funding for relief and development efforts seen by some political analysts as indispensable for shoring up the peace efforts.
And it has probably weakened his political standing by undermining any notion that as a Hutu he could cajole the rebel groups, who regard him as a sell out atop a system of Tutsi supremacy, into joining the peace process.
"The violence puts the whole process in question," said Jean Marie Gasana of the International Crisis Group. "The message that the rebels are sending is that no one can ignore them."
Van Eck says it is time to acknowledge that the peace process is flawed, noting that the main Hutu militias never signed the South African brokered accord in 2000 that set out the planned transition to democracy.
"It's the process that's the problem -- it imposes an accord on rebels who didn't sign it in the first place. The timetable of the process has to be put on hold until there is a ceasefire, otherwise we are going to take Burundi to a disaster."
